[3] On the jacket of Anastas's second book, The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance: A Novel, Daniel Handler called it "hands down, the best novel of the year".
[4] It concerns the disappearance of the pastor of a liberal Congregational church in suburban Boston[5] and was a New York Times Notable Book.
In 2005, The Yale Review published his novella Versace Enthroned with Saints: Margaret, Jerome, Alex and the Angel Donatella[9] and later awarded it the Smart Family Foundation Prize for Fiction.
[13] His essay on the Gullah language folktale ″Buh Black Snake Git Ketch″ appeared in the Spring, 2020 issue of The Oxford American.
[17] Giles Harvey, writing in The New Yorker,[19] groups Too Good to Be True in a category he calls the "failure memoir"[20] and cites F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up essays as an influence.